CEO Anonymous With Purdeep Sangha
How Outsourcing Can Grow Your Business And Improve Your Happiness
October 6, 2022
Making the decision to strategically outsource can be a smart business decision but more importantly, it can be a smart life decision. And for family businesses, it can help you grow much faster.
So welcome back to another episode of the Business Brothers podcast and as usual, I'm flying solo right now because my brother is knee deep with two little kids, two little boys under the age of two and uh he's a little busy just to say the least. Actually, they just picked up a nanny that's helping out with them and I think it's a lifesaver because having two young kids is not easy and that is one of the reasons why we have our guest here today to talk about how he can potentially help you um leave some of the stress that you might have in your business or your personal life. So I want to welcome Tyler Cameron here today who is the founder and Ceo of work sourcing. So Tyler, welcome to the show, Thank you so much for having me. I can totally relate to the kids. I have a seven and four year old and we're currently on the move up to Collinwood to get closer to my parents. So um yeah, I can totally relate with your brother. Yeah, that's a cool move where you and I briefly discussed that before, but it seems like a lot of people, So we're up here in Canada, Tyler's not too far from me and we're in Ontario and Tyler, you're moving, I'm going to say north and not necessarily boonie ville, but a lot more rule than where you are right now right. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, just outside of Toronto here now where I currently live, like you said close to you, pretty, but we're moving a couple hours north, it's a ski town, it's Ontario's mountain if you will. So um a bit, a bit closer to my parents and family and we're really excited for the move awesome. Yeah, I'm excited for you guys because I think that's, that's gonna be an awesome change for your family. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background because you have work sourcing, you've, your family has had a family business. Um you can give the audience a little bit of background here. Yeah, I guess I'll start at the start considering we're talking about family businesses. So I grew up in a family business my parents have owned and operated a nursery, garden center and landscaping business for 35 years and they actually just sold it and officially our retired, So huge success story for them. Um it's in a small town, they were able to really grow up from nothing. Um I can look back now and see the, the risks my dad took launching the business starting from cutting grass, launching a much larger operation. Um that was normal life for me. I, I grew up, our house was a part of the business, so maybe that's why I like to be so busy because there was people constantly coming in and out. We had a monitor that people would would come into the store and my parents would run down and help them and I really truly saw what, what it took a day to day and and more importantly behind the scenes for husband and wife team to run a family business, they're still together which is the success um to be business partners and life partners um But just the hard work seven days a week for 89 months of the year. Um and just behind the scenes doing the books, calling people late at night, that's that was my environment growing up. Um And from there I moved to the city closer to Toronto, got an advertising um work for larger companies. Um But I want I will call out, I did work for one called The Score which is a sports company and it was actually a large company, one of the biggest ones in Canada and it's even bigger now that it was bought by the U. S. Conglomerate but it was a family run business so it felt family so john and Benji and Aubrey Levy, you know, they ran and operated this business um And it really had that touch that family touch the loyalty, the openness which I was accustomed to. Um um And I was there for 9.5 years on two different stints. So yeah so that was kind of there and then from there I always knew I wanted to you know that entrepreneurial spirit was I think in my D. N. A. From my parents um just growing up with that and wanting to do my own thing. So I actually started the virtual assistant space about three years ago launched a business called dad sourcing which is very family oriented, more concierge service for dads and families to live a healthier happier life. Um That one was put a little bit on the back burner once the pandemic hit. But you know there's still some some great stuff we can we can do with that business. And then currently um mostly on the day to day it's it's operating work sourcing. Work sourcing is kind of a similar engine in terms of the virtual assistant support but we're helping businesses and we're helping entrepreneurs and small businesses and family businesses really by taking admin and sales and marketing tasks off their plate. Which means essentially that those pain points of not having time to get to those nitty gritty daily tasks or weekly asked that they don't have time for, they don't know how to do or they don't want to do so they can truly grow your business and do what they love doing and in their own business. Yeah. So I think you touched on a number of things there first is um the dad sourcing part which has kind of morphed into work sourcing. That's really interesting because as men we don't necessarily have personal assistance in our life, right? Uh And that's really interesting. We might have executive assistance for our business. But personal assistance. That's a different story I can share from personal experience that this is the first year that I've actually hired someone to cut my grass. That was a huge, huge change for me because I have a big yard and it takes me a very long time. I used it kind of as a stress mechanism to, but this was the first time that I said, hey look, if I don't feel like cutting the grass this weekend, I'm gonna hire someone and I did it and it was the best feeling. So I still cut the grass myself. But um now I know I have the option of getting some help when I don't feel like it. So I think that's an amazing thing for people out there for guys out there um, in their personal lives because that can just free up a lot of time and energy. Uh and I'm gonna say this because we talked about being dads is not necessarily to go back to work, but maybe even spending more time with our kids. Yeah, exactly. And that's that's exactly what I wanted to do. I think a big, the big why dad's source of my started was in around mental health, which is kind of what you're talking about. It's, it's relieving that stress is how do you live a healthier, happier life? And we get caught up, right, We get caught up on the day to day stuff. I got to cut the grass. I have a couple acres. I totally get it. It takes a long time. I do like to throw in a couple of podcasts and, and cut it, but I mean at times would I rather just be hanging out with my family or going for a hike and getting some exercise? Absolutely. And it's just stepping back and evaluating that on a personal level. Um and we kind of do both the personal and and on the business side of things. So you're bang on and good for you for hiring someone to cut your grass from time to time, because it is, it's a it's a nice, it's a nice break. Yeah, it is definitely. So with work sourcing what, so again, with family businesses, what I normally note, uh notice most of the time is that a lot of the times our team members are our local team members, either family members or their someone. They know community members, what it is, whatever it is. But until a certain family business gets to a certain size, a significant size, they tend to keep their own internal employees. They don't necessarily outsource a lot of stuff because there's a control factor there. Um what have you seen whether it's non family or family, because I think even in the corporate world it's difficult for people to let go of stuff just in general, but is there is that common that you come across people are just like, yeah. You know what, I don't know about outsourcing. Absolutely. It's the main question and the main conversation, we have um our processes, you know, that's kind of a gap I saw to be honest, like there's a lot of platforms out there where you can just say I need help, I need to outsource this and there's more and more companies popping up all the time with me having a small town and and family business background, we've created more of a personalized approach where we want to earn your trust, we want it to be personalized, We're finding you the right person because it is really hard. It's not just a matter of throwing a warm body and to just do some tasks. It's how does that person fit in, especially if it's a family, how does it fit in with your family, in your business? So we look at personality skill set experience, we love when people have worked, our virtual assistants have worked with family businesses or really closely with C E. O. S. Um Because they get it, they get that there's a lot there, I would say just kind of going back to your point of family businesses, what we see currently and we work with a bunch of them. What we see currently is, yes, they do get the family members or somebody close to them to do specific tasks. Um It's the realization that their skill set might not be best suited where maybe they don't have a digital marketing background and they've just been trying to figure it out and if you really wanted to and that's probably worked for a while, but if you really want to take your business to the next level, that's where I love being able to come in, help with social media, marketing sales, like finding leads for them. So they're not just all referrals from family members or people in the community, they can actually truly grow their business um in different ways and sometimes you do need a different person in there to do that. Yeah, that's a really good point, a skill set, right, being effective from, from that side, um What are the kinds of things that your company helps businesses with? Yeah, great question. There's a lot, it's a long list. We try to, we try to boil it down. Just, we're having conversations, we do, we try to create a priority list and what's the most important for them um to see what's taking up the most time, a lot of the time it's back and I mean a lot of the time they are just doing it themselves, whether it's a family member or someone that they just had forever. That could be just sending invoices, it could just be following up and touching um just touch points with customers, It could be getting more sophisticated with a crm, hey, can you set up an actual proper crm and maintain it and clean it for us? That's big, just to be a little more organized to instill a little more process, some of these family businesses are um they've been just doing the same thing for years, right, and maybe there's someone new, a son or a daughter coming in um and they want to just revamp it a little bit just to automate, make their life easy, so maybe they can spend more time as a family together, so we do a lot of admin tasks um and then on the sales and marketing side we help out a lot of social media because let's be honest, it's a necessary evil for a lot of people um it's a time suck personally for for some, and but for businesses, especially locally in the community, you want to have that personalization and make sure people know who you are and what your values are as a company to continue to grow, not just rest on who you work with in the past and you can just refer your business, it's, but it's overwhelming, so we come in and help a lot with that, whether it's creation of graphics, posting on platforms, you weren't aware of all that fun stuff, so we can help out in a lot of ways, awesome, so from the audience out there that people are what we work with, obviously businesses, family businesses and family business owners and executive teams, that conversation about outsources versus keeping it internal comes up quite a bit because I'm a big supporter of outsourcing because it frees up resources, even if it costs more, when we take a look at resources, it's not just the dollar signs, it's the mental capacity, right? That is even more important. Human capital is the most important capital that a business has, aside from any intellectual property. And so if your human capital is getting bogged down by administrative tasks or tasks that they're not um proficient or there's conflicting and here's what our research shows and this is consistent with other people's research. If you give someone more than two projects, the effectiveness of those projects goes down. And so this there's a constant conflict of people doing their day to day jobs and when you add more stuff to them and it's not related to what they do, which happens a lot in family business, right? Everybody is kind of like the catch all for for certain jobs. It reduces the effectiveness and then it reduces basically the revenue that you're generating and the cost that you're saving. So here's the quick checklist that we go through. Is it a competitive advantage to keep the stuff internally? If it's not a competitive advantage in terms of having intellectual property, human capital, whatever it is, maybe it's a certain skill set that you don't want your competition to get ahold of, then yeah, you may want to keep it internally, but if it's not a competitive advantage, then outsource it there's a cost associated right? Even if it's a little bit more expensive we do encourage it because again it frees up internal resources and mental capacity and and then you have to take a look at, can you even create a strategic partnership or alignment with a potential outsourcing company? There's a number of partners that we've worked with, where we've connected them with certain I. T. Companies outsourced or whatever it may be that they've created a strategic alliance with and that they've able to come to market with a new product or service that they've been able to generate revenue on. So there's there's these pros and cons that all businesses have to business leaders have to weigh out. Um But it is a very valid strategy to move forward. So perhaps you can talk about some of the success stories that you've seen um or some positive benefits that businesses have experienced as a result of working with you. Yeah absolutely it's multitasking, it's funny, it doesn't really work. We used to think it was the best thing ever but the more and more projects it's just it's evident in everybody's day to day that it becomes more difficult with your efficiency. So yeah in terms of success stories um nothing makes me happier seeing um the work life balance. So we work with um you know working with someone specifically their their consultant. So they they're kind of doing everything um they have their wife helping out behind the scenes and doing some of that admitting stuff but it's just following up with people, it's getting new leads, so they work with us. Um and not only have we got into a relationship with the the professional side of things, you can just see he's lighter, he's working on more strategic things. Um conversations are more frequent, it just makes me so happy to then hear like, hey I'm taking off for an extra long weekend, can your V. A. Hold down the fort over gone. Like that is just music to my ears because that shows me that they're actually living life and not just stuck stressing out even when they're trying to enjoy a weekend, they're just not thinking about work the whole time. They know we've got them behind the scenes, so we work with so many different industries, it's, we don't really boil it down to one, it's just so many people need the same things. They need help with ad men, they need help with leads and they need help with some of their marketing and and that's where we can step in and help them free of time so they can enjoy their family and spend some time not thinking about work. Yeah, that's that's interesting because this part of conversation that I had with an entrepreneur the other days extremely successful, making a ton of money and he's got new goals and new aspirations to move on to do different things. But the one thing that was bogging him down was his energy, he just didn't have the capacity and energy to do. So he had the, he had the will, he had the clarity, he knew exactly what he wanted to achieve or what he wants to achieve, but he just wasn't there yet in terms of his capacity. And so this can help release some capacity for those of you who have listened to some of my other podcasts, whether it's the Mine shop podcast or the Complete Mind podcast, there's a concept that has, has been around for centuries when it comes to learning something, you are doing a new venture or expanding yourself. One of the first things that you have to do is empty the cup. This is an old buddhist principle, right? Because they say that majority of people are walking around with a full cup as it is and if you try to pour more into it, you're just spilling the coffee right, you're just overflowing the cup. So you have to be able to get rid of a lot of those things that you're dealing with today to be able to add more stuff on, add more initiatives on add new ventures on. Um it's, it's really interesting when you take a look at the psyche of people and how we think um one of the main initiatives that we do, Tyler, this is for your benefit and for our audience as well is before when we work with our teams, whether it's executive teams or even been management. One of the first things that we do before we add something onto their plate is take something away. We always use the subtraction principal first because anytime you tell someone that you're going to, hey, you need to do this in addition to what you're already doing, good luck. But if you say, hey, we're gonna take this away from you or we're gonna streamline this or make this more efficient and we're going to help you do this other initiative. That's when they're more open to doing things differently. That's where Tyler like that's, that's a huge benefit for a company, like your yourself, right? That's where you can come in and help people do that. Because one of the big questions that people have, if you try to take stuff away from them is well, who's going to do this, you don't have the capacity. So it's great. No, I was just gonna say that's that's brilliant. And um, like we do a lot of that day to day, but putting it in those words is makes so much sense because that's when you tell somebody you're gonna add some to their plate, It's like, how much work is this gonna be? What's the lift from my side and, and, and yeah, they could get more stressed out? So it's, it's a brilliant strategy. So what do you what are you working on here actually, before I ask you this question, there's something else to what I'm saying is a massive influx virtual assistant companies and outsourcing companies that's happened because I think there's a number of reasons for it because um you know, the gates have opened up. There's a lot more proficient people that speak english and proficient in their practices overseas. What makes your company different than other virtual assistant companies? Yeah, that's that's a great question. And you're completely right. There's a lot of companies coming up, you know, during this time, during the pandemic, we launched work sources during the pandemic. What truly sets us apart is, you know, not only my experience and skill set of 17 years of advertising, the media background, um, and instilling that in the company and the people around me and giving them knowledge of how we set up the business. It's the personalization. It's, it's having um that really strong conversation where we don't feel like other companies are doing it. We haven't seen it where we're not just asking you about business when we're having our discovery calls were asking you about personality types and how you work and what's your process and getting to the true meaning and the true pain points of, you know, you might have a problem that you think is very surface level and people will always say I'm so busy because I've got to do all my bookkeeping myself that's a problem. But I mean like what can we do to get even beneath that And then from there we can really, like you said they can start adding on more things where we can not only take away some admin tasks so they can streamline things a little bit more. Um But we can even be proactive because we know them, you know we we take a really personalized approach to knowing the person as well as the business in the in the industry and we're matching them with people that we know are gonna be the best fit versus just throwing the next virtual assistant up. We have a really strong vetted platform. Um and the pool of people so I feel like that's what makes us different and you know people are liking that like you said finding a trusted virtual assistant partner instead of just hiring someone to do some stuff for them. Yeah because I hear this complaint a lot from individuals that use virtual assistant services is that they end up just going through a number of different assistants because either they're not proficient, They haven't done their research. It just doesn't match with the organization. So I think there's a huge advantage with your firm in what you do because there's that stronger connection there. Um And one of the things that I always warn people about which I think you guys have done a very good job with is a lot of people will outsource but it actually ends up costing them more money and time headache because they're spending more time trying to correct the mistakes of the VHS. They're spending more time trying to manage the V. A. S. Um Because it's a tougher um It's a tougher journey sometimes because if you don't find the right fit, if you don't find the right individual, you can actually take more of your time, right? It's it's like now you've hired just like hiring maybe an employee who hasn't fit and you have to physically present. Now you have this person potentially overseas. You know, how are you going to do with that? That's a whole other complexity. I get emails and messages all the time. That's a we're having this deal for $5. VHS and you know what, It's great. And I see a lot of people like interested. Someone, someone messaged me the other day and said um hey look what do you think about this? I'm getting a V. A. For um $7 from this one place and $10 from this other place. The other, the $10 place. Seems like you know they do more research and they better matching whatever. But this other places, seven bucks. I'm like are you freaking kidding me for three bucks? You're actually gonna you're gonna take the chance. Um Just because it might save you a couple 100 bucks at the end of the month. Like you know go with a more reputable company go with a company that does stuff like you do Tyler which is going through the process to make sure you have the right fit. Yeah and I'd love to add on that because we get that all the time because there are so many companies out there and we have V. S. Overseas and we also offer local um And not only if you're if you're getting somebody for $7 an hour, think about you know what their experience is. You know think about the motivation of that person because they're not getting $7 an hour if you're going through an agency that's another differentiator for us. We're paying well above market value. And then also we're getting people we have very little turnover or via is stay with us and we're building a very cool culture where they want to continue to build upon one client, two clients and and whatever their schedule and her skill set because we have a dedicated via success manager and relationship manager. So she works with them on a day to day basis. Every client has a dedicated account manager that just comes with the with the the bucket of ours that you buy and that's just such a benefit. We also have our own portals and our own systems in place. So it's not just one V. A. Shows up and they're just sitting there with a computer waiting to work. Um We have a really strong system and last point we do manage expectations. Some people hire A. V. A. We're very transparent. We're not just like yeah this is just gonna work out. We say this is too two way street and we make people sign a contract that actually has a part in there about etiquette, how you know this is basically you're hiring someone, even if it's short term, you're hiring somebody like an employee, treat them with respect, treat them like you would an employee and factor in the onboarding necessary to make sure they're successful and we're gonna be watching and we'll call you out if you're not. So we don't mind jumping in saying, hey you I actually haven't spent any time they're confused or you really need to need to you know, give them access here or the autonomy here. So I feel like there's there's so many ways that it's working for us and we're going to continue to hold through that. Okay, that is awesome. So I again, I'm giving my two cents when it comes to outsourcing. I think it's absolutely amazing. I think more family business owners need to consider that or at least have your executive teams, your mid management teams actually do some research. So if if some of the listeners here want to find out more about work sourcing and outsourcing in general or just chat with you. Where can they find you Tyler Yeah you can find us at work sourcing. So W. R. K. Sourcing dot com. We're on all the socials under work sourcing. Once again its W. RK because we're cool like that. Um So yeah we're on everything. You find me on linkedin. I'm always available if someone wants to chat. I feel like it's just even educating people about to your point like just doing research. I'm always open to have that conversation even if people don't work with us, I think it's just great to be able to give people um the thought of possibly hiring somebody knowing that there's a resource like us and other via companies out there. Yeah that's awesome. So and I can personally vouch for Tyler because I know him personally. He's an amazing person, amazing dude and um family man. So I think what you're doing is awesome. Tyler so keep going. I want to thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Business Brothers podcast. Please subscribe and share. Even if you're not interested in outsourcing or what work sourcing is doing. Please do share this episode because I can guarantee you someone out there is going to pick up on this and need the help that Tyler provides. So thank you very much for listening and we'll see you next time. Take care